Against Affect

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including Selfish Women and After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century. She is an editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.

"An indispensable critique of the contemporary epistemic and affective terrain. Its proposal for a redistribution of reason is a crucial path out of this terrain. . . . The boldness of the diagnostic and critical dimensions of this argument leave the book with few peers."--Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism "For progressives, a moment of truth arrives when their battles against old dogmas merely prove to entrench new ones. In Against Affect Lisa Downing . . . throws down the gauntlet to everyone active in the humanities and social sciences today."--Eric Heinze, author of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything "This is a timely and deeply important book in which Lisa Downing offers up a concerted intellectual assault on affect theory--and the broader cultural turn to emotion--that should make even the most trenchant of advocates pay attention. This is not mere attack or deconstruction, however, but instead a clear and precise argument for the return of rationality, grounded in a feminist neo-enlightenment, to academia and Western culture more widely. Against Affect is not a book that can or should be ignored by anyone interested in navigating a route through present cultural challenges that is progressive but also grounded in reason."--Darren Langdridge, author of Sexual Citizenship and Social Change: A Dialectical Approach to Narratives of Tradition and Critique